Snapseed App Brings Pro-Level Photo Editing to iPad

Nik's Snapseed hides a lot of power under a shiny, good-looking hood

It’s been just over a year since the original iPad shipped, and only now are we really seeing apps that are suited for the bigger multitouch screen. One of those is Snapseed, a new image-editing app from Nik. You may know Nik for its expensive and excellent software and plugins for the desktop.

Snapseed is thankfully a lot cheaper, at just $5, but it feels as full-baked as its desktop cousins. It also brings across Nik’s own U-Point product.

To use the app, you pick a photo from your collection just as you’d expect. You see your image, and next to it are the various effects you can apply. You can choose various special effects, from “Grunge” through “Vintage Film” to “Organic Frames,” or you can head straight for the meat, which is centered on “Selective Adjust.”

All the filters use a combination of swiping and pinching. You swipe up and down anywhere on screen to pick the attribute (brightness, saturation, grunge effect) and swipe left and right to vary the intensity. It’s a control method which is instantly familiar, and also very fast and powerful.

In the case of Selective Adjust, you also tap on the point where you’d like to apply an adjustment (a long tap brings up a loupe for more accurate placement) and then pick whether to adjust brightness, saturation or color (all three can be changed on a single point). Then you pinch to set the size of the effect, and swipe left or right to adjust. The U-Point tech automatically finds the edges of the area you are tweaking, confining saturation to the sky, for instance.

It is a lot more intuitive than the desktop implementation.

The level of polish is high. Not only are the built-in filters good, but there are lots of extras in the UI. For instance, tapping on a control point lets you cut copy and paste as well as delete it, and the dots also contain the initial letter of the last parameter you adjusted. You can also tap and hold a “compare” button at any time to peek at the previous version.

Another nicety is that the first time you use an effect, an overlay appears with clear instructions. These can be brought back at any time with the help button.

Any photographers are likely downloading this already. I just moved it to my first home screen.